Determiner phrase in a language without determiners (with apologies to Jim Huang 1982)

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5777547
AutoresLjiljana Progovac (0000-0001-8679-5809, Wayne State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1998
Volumen34
Número1
Páginas165-179
Fecha de publicación1998-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-2267 • E-ISSN: 1469-7742
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0022226797006865
OpenAlexW2074693065
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas39
Referencias citadas5

Serbo-Croatian (SC) is a language without articles, probably the only category of speech that has uncontroversially and crosslinguistically been argued to occupy the head of the Determiner Phrase (DP). This paper argues that even SC, a language without articles, projects a DP on top of NPs in argument positions. The strongest evidence comes from noun/pronoun asymmetries, where the pronouns precede, and nouns follow, certain intensifying adjectives. Assuming that these adjectives occupy a fixed syntactic position, the conclusion must be that pronouns occupy a structurally higher position than nouns. Since the evidence of such asymmetries is extremely sparse in the data, the children presumably cannot rely on them to conclude that there is a DP in SC. Since there are also no articles in SC, children have virtually no evidence of the existence of a DP. It must be then that the projection of DPs is a universal property, independent of the presence of the lexical item which solely occupies the head of the projection. Morphological properties of SC pronouns and adjectives actually support the existence of more than just one functional projection in the noun phrase in SC. The paper derives Greenberg's universal 43, which states that pronouns are more likely to have (gender) morphology than nouns, by arguing that pronouns move (overtly) through more functional projections than nouns, and ultimately land in D

Argument (complex analysis · Determiner · Determiner phrase · Proper noun · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation